Brands depend on personal relationships to turn leads into customers and to deliver a great customer experience. And for budding businesses, that personalization process has often relied on gathering customer data from third-party sources — but that era may be coming to a close.
Thanks to the backlash from its dealings with Cambridge Analytica, in which the personal data of millions of Facebook users was improperly accessed, Facebook is ending advertisers’ ability to supplement targeting data from third-party sources with its own data. (Brands can still infuse third-party data with Facebook targeting, but they’ll have to buy the data themselves because Facebook wants no part of it.)
Most businesses that used this service did so because they aren’t leveraging data from their internal customer relationship management (CRM) system properly. That’s why Facebook’s policy changes might actually be a blessing in disguise: Startups can be far more successful using their CRM to access customer insights than buying data from any third-party source.